


Stationkeeping

by pocketmouse



Category: This Is Why We Fight (The Decemberists)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-22
Updated: 2013-09-22
Packaged: 2017-12-27 09:04:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/976953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocketmouse/pseuds/pocketmouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is why we fight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stationkeeping

**Author's Note:**

  * For [perfectworry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectworry/gifts).



> Thanks to teaotter for betaing this for me!

The sky was gone.

Alanna craned her neck as she looked up, cupping her hands around her eyes to block the faint light from the road. Her eyesight might not be the best, but she could usually make out some detail in the darkness. Tonight there was nothing but black. Not even the faintest star was visible, and neither were the slate-grey shutters of the radiation shields. That could only mean one thing.

Mara would be home soon.

Alanna turned her eyes from the void-black troopship nestled into the curve of the station and took hurried stock of their little homestead. Seven months ago the front porch looked like something out of a recruitment poster. Now it was a hopeless mess. And inside wasn’t much better. She’d barely been able to keep up with the crops — the harvesting machines had all been seconded for the battlefront, and half the township gone as well. With only people to do the work, and largely unenhanced ones at that, it had been all they could do to settle the crops before they spoiled in the fields. The house had, by necessity, fallen by the wayside.

The thought of welcoming Mara home to a wreck of a house in addition to a barren town and an empty field was almost more than she could bear. Alanna took another look at the stealth ship and tucked up her hair, snapped the wrinkles out of her skirt, and squared her shoulders. She would, as always, do what she could in the time she had.

She was just putting the last of the laundry up to dry under the artificial night when the transit pod came down by the windbreak, stirring their leaves. Wreathed in smoke and dying plasma, the figure exiting was impossible to see directly, but she could make out the outline of hard shoulder plates and hair whipping in the wind, behind the chaotic array of pronged horns on the figure’s helmet. At least thirteen points — Mara. Alanna brushed the damp off her hands and ran to meet her.

"You’re home! I didn’t expect to see you for another month yet!" Mara caught her up at the waist and twirled her around. Alanna clung onto her shoulders, almost dizzy with happiness. "I haven’t had nearly enough time to clean things up, stationkeeping’s been keeping us all busy —"

"You always think the house is a mess; I’m sure it’s spotless."

Alanna cradled the featureless oval of Mara’s flight mask between her hands. She could see her warped reflection staring back at her. "Take this off, I want to kiss you."

There was a blank silence that should have been a sigh. "I can’t."

Alanna froze. "What? But — no —"

"The Fermians uploaded a virus while we were in transit. It corrupted forty percent of the fleet before we were able to stop it." Mara — _was_ it Mara in there? — held her gently at the waist, as if anticipating Alanna pulling away, but in truth she couldn’t move. "We had to dump the core and detonate the weapons cache early. Systems managed to keep personality profiles intact for everyone, but physical parameters —" The empty mask shook its head. "The only backup of those are at fleet headquarters, and even at top speed they won’t reach here for three weeks. It was put us all in the pluslight operations suits or waste a whole ship waiting for thirty people to get their bodies back." Mara’s voice was edging towards bitter at the end of her explanation but the sound was just slightly off, like whatever synthesizer was inside the suit couldn’t quite manage the right shade of wryness.

Alanna stared at the suit carefully. She wasn’t an engineer, but enough information made its way back to the station that she had a rough idea of how the suit worked. Faster than light travel was the only way to fight proactively in an interstellar battle. It was also too hard on the body and impossible on the brain. Pluslight operations suits could function in realtime, and were controlled by the uplinked brainwaves of the crew — data was strength, every fleet follower knew that. The suit in front of her both was and was not her wife. Mind — yes. Body — the operations suits were hazmat sealed. Even if Mara had been allowed to come home and not report to a reprocessing facility, best not to test their luck.

"Are you all right?" she asked quietly. She didn’t ask if Mara would be returning to duty. She’d find the time later to ask ‘when.’

"I’ve had some time to get used to the idea," Mara’s gentlest tone drifted out of the suit. "The suits need routine maintenancing, but fleet command has agreed to open up a port in the town center for the duration." Now there was a definite audible smirk. "Fleet ports are required to fix any civilian equipment damaged as a result of wartime seconding."

" _Any_ equipment —" Alanna started. She turned around to look at their struggling little farm, the rolling hills of the station floor.

"You’ve been making do with relics. I know the harvest is already over, but the storage and the processing — that’s not all done, and everyone’s been sharing the same essential machines, they must be wearing into overuse." Mara’s arms wrapped around her again and this time Alanna settled back into the taller woman’s embrace, the hard point of the helmet tucked against her shoulder, the arch of a horn curving around the back of her head. "You keep telling me how things are going here, the work everyone’s doing to keep the station running, to keep everyone fed, clothed, happy. It seems like a dream, sometimes. Or a story, that you’re sending me piece by piece. Something that happens without me." Mara’s hands clutch her tighter before she can protest the words. "I wanted to do something. Something you could see, now. Not in five or twenty years, whenever we’ve fought off the Fermians and the Uppani and whatever other vultures come after us next."

"Some _one_ is more important than some _thing_ ," Alanna said firmly.

"I fight for you as well." The argument was old, well-worn.

"Not just now, though," Alanna said. "Now you’re home. And you’ll rest. And heal." She nodded to herself. "And be a part of all of this, so you can take it with you when you have to go back."

"Is this your way of telling me you still haven’t fixed the gutters?"

"Maybe." Mara laughed. Oh, she had missed that sound. "You don’t have to tip the fleet’s hand to make me see your touch in every corner of this farm. This place is ours, the both of us, I can’t look anywhere without thinking of you. But I stay here, I see it every day. For you — you have to get it into your bones, your muscles, so it doesn’t drift off the second you hit null-g."

"Nothing could make me drift from you," Mara replied firmly. "Not genetic rebuilding, not retox, and certainly — well, probably — not the gutters." The blank face of the helmet bussed Alanna’s cheek in a poor imitation of a kiss, but she couldn’t mind the strangeness at all. The artificial night closed in around them. In a day or so, the stars would slip back into place, but Mara would still be here. The war would wear on, and whether she went with it or no, she — they — would be _here_.


End file.
